Tag / Yik Yak

Last week at Penn State University, numerous black student groups came together to organize a week of “die in” peaceful protests to make a statement about the Michael Brown non-indictment decision and later the Eric Garner non-indictment decision. The first day of protests took place in the HUB-Robeson center. The passionate students dropped down in the middle of the bustling student center and lied there for forty-five minutes to symbolize the 4.5 minutes that Mike Brown bleed dead in the Ferguson street.

This silent exercise infuriated many of the Penn State Students and led to appalling tweets as these:

After a week of tears, anger resulting in emotional exhaustion, my pastor gathered a few of us together, including several Police Chiefs in the area to discuss the racist responses to the protesters and the perceived community ‘silence’ and apathy towards the #blacklivesmatter movement in State College.

One Penn State professor mentioned that she hears from her students that a lot of this contentious behavior is stemming from Yik Yak.

I was like, “what in the world is Yik Yak?”.

She explained that it is a social media tool that allows users to remain anonymous as they can vote positively or negatively on their friends comments. From media reports, the Yik Yak app is spreading like wildfire across college campuses and is quickly gaining investors.

Here at Penn State, the issue I find with Yik Yak, sadly, is that the negative, racist statements against the “die in” protests have been winning by a landslide. I will not resort to completely knocking Yik Yak as I have never used the app and still know very little about it. However, I do take serious issue with any tool that allows people to say hateful things against their fellow sisters and brothers of the human race while they “lie” in secret like big cowards and trolls who consistently hide behind their fake social media account names spewing venomous comments on posts they do not agree with.

Dear negative, malicious secret social media users, if you can’t say it to my face then you are representing a lily-livered, spineless, chicken-hearted and pusillanimous behavior.

Thesauruses are AWESOME!

Let’s walk in love, peace and unity – in our classrooms, on our jobs, in our churches and on social media.